


Gravity

by Fancy Lads Snacks (Filthy_Bunny)



Series: Judesville [3]
Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Child Death, Death, Established Relationship, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Canon, Referenced Slavery, referenced rape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-06
Updated: 2015-07-06
Packaged: 2018-04-07 21:57:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4279377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Filthy_Bunny/pseuds/Fancy%20Lads%20Snacks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arcade has seen some awful things, but tending to the sick in the aftermath of Hoover Dam Two could be what breaks him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gravity

**Author's Note:**

> Based on this kinkmeme prompt: http://falloutkinkmeme.livejournal.com/4875.html?thread=8677643#t8677643

Arcade hitched a ride downriver on a barge delivering cement from Boulder City for the building work at Cottonwood. The river was rough that day, which didn’t much help to ease the bile rising in his stomach. It was evening when he let himself into the little house overlooking the Cove. He didn’t know whether to refer to it as ‘their’ house yet. Jude had been using it for a while now, Arcade had joined him a few weeks back, and it was gradually taking on both their personalities via the books and clothes and other detritus washing up in the rooms as they came and went. But with the infant town still being formed around them, nothing felt permanent.

He heard voices in the kitchen, most likely an informal committee meeting between Jude and some of the other town stakeholders. He closed the door quietly behind him, and chose to head straight for the bedroom rather than attempt small talk. He needed to change.

As soon as his pack hit the floor, he peeled off his lab coat and threw it into the corner. It would need to be boil washed. He sat down on the edge of the bed to unbutton his shirt. It was his spare; the other he hadn’t even bothered to bring home. Threw it in a trashcan fire with the used bandages and other contaminated supplies that morning.

Two long days and nights at the field hospital near Fortification Hill. Two days and nights and he never wanted to set foot that side of the river again. After what he’d seen, he knew he would have to. He grimaced and bent to unlace his boots.

The former site of the Legate’s camp had been the best place to treat the wounded in the immediate aftermath of Hoover Dam Two. It was a combined labour of the Followers and NCR, and even now, three months down the line, there were still scores of soldiers and former slaves or prisoners of the Legion in need of care. Up above it on the hill, the Fort itself had become an NCR prison camp. Arcade had seen Legion POWs at the hospital too, stripped of their uniforms but easy to identify under their wounds and plain clothes by the collars around their necks. Even a man with both legs torn off below the knees had worn one. Arcade hadn’t been sure how to feel about that.

None of his patients had been legionaries. He hadn’t been asked, this time. He didn’t know what he would have said if he had been.

His shirt and socks joined the laundry pile, and he paced over to the trunk by the wall to find something clean. The first shirt he found was one of Jude’s, a black and white plaid. The flannel was worn thin and it was patched in front, but it was one of Jude’s favourites. Arcade pulled it on. It was laundered but still bore the faint scent of wood smoke and gun oil. Jude smells. Arcade breathed it in gratefully. Anything to cover up the sharp tang that countless washes with carbolic soap had left on his skin.

He heard the bedroom door open behind him as he was rolling up the sleeves.

“There you are,” a smiling voice said. “I wasn’t expecting you back til tomorrow.” A moment later Jude’s hands came around his waist. “Tom and Zoe were just asking about your ideas for the clinic. You should come tell them about it.”

Arcade gave Jude’s hands a squeeze, then pulled away, shaking his head. “I’m tired,” he said. He bent down to rummage in the trunk for some clean socks. He could feel Jude watching him.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” Arcade said. He closed the chest with a creak of hinges, and sat down on it to pull on his socks. “Just a hard couple of days. I’ll be fine.”

“Come have a drink with us.”

Arcade leaned his head on his hands. The thought of socialising was unbearable. It certainly wasn’t personal. He had know Tom Anderson for years through the Followers, and they’d always gotten along even if Tom was a little more militant about his ideals than Arcade. As for Zoe, he’d only met the good Mrs. Masterson a couple of weeks ago, but already greatly admired her. After her husband was killed by tribals up in Utah, she had sold their smallholding in Sac-Town and put everything she had into keeping his caravan company alive. She’d had a little help from Jude, but the success of Happy Trails was really down to her grit and ingenuity. Normally a drink in their company would have been a welcome end to the day. But all Arcade felt like doing at this moment in time was crawling under the covers and staying there for a week.

He looked up at Jude for the first time. “I’m sorry, Jude, I just—not now.”

Jude took one look at Arcade’s face and his brow darkened in concern. He crouched down to look him in the eye. “Hey, what’s wrong?” A warm hand cupped Arcade’s face.

Looking into Jude’s eyes somehow made it too much. All day long he’d felt bone-tired and numb right to his soul, but now he felt like crying. He closed his eyes. “Please. Not right now.”

Jude stroked his cheek for a moment, then stood up. “Just gimme two minutes.” He ducked back down quickly to plant a kiss on Arcade’s lips. “I’m so glad you’re home,” he said.

Arcade tried his best to smile. “So am I.”

He heard Jude leave the room. Soon after there was a low exchange of voices, and the front door opened and closed. A couple of minutes later Arcade got up and shuffled into the kitchen.

“I’m sorry,” he said, leaning in the doorway. “They didn’t have to leave for my sake.”

“Shh, it’s fine.” Jude held up a bottle. “Drink?”

Arcade nodded. Jude poured a slug of rum into a teacup. This house wasn’t as lavishly equipped as the Lucky 38; there weren’t two items in the kitchen that matched. Arcade took the cup gratefully.

“Are you hungry? Zoe brought us fresh corn. And I made ’lurk chowder. There’s plenty left.”

Arcade knew he should be hungry after barely eating all day, but his mood had curbed his appetite. “Later?”

“Sure. Now go sit down. You look exhausted.”

Arcade did as he was told. The living room was gloomy now the sun had set. The one working lamp on the wall barely gave off enough light to reach the corners. Arcade settled into the couch with his drink. Jude joined him a minute later. He reached for the old candy tin on the table and rested it on his knee, and set to work rolling each of them a cigarette. One of the perks of Jude having made himself best friends with just about every caravaneer in the desert was that he sometimes got first dibs on the finest merchandise coming through the Mojave, not least of which was this rich, fragrant tobacco from a plantation somewhere back West. It was nothing like the crumbling packaged filters they had always smoked back on the Strip. Arcade watched as Jude carefully rolled the tight little tubes, sealed them with a quick flick of his tongue, and lit them from the bright flare of a match. He passed one to Arcade, then sat back against the sagging cushions. His hand rested on Arcade’s knee.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked softly.

Arcade shook his head. They sat there in silence for a long while, Arcade just listening to the tiny crackle of his cigarette as he inhaled, his own breath going in and out like a tide. Feeling the warmth of the rum in his belly, the warmth of Jude’s hand as it smoothed back and forth on his knee.

“There was a girl,” he said suddenly. “Pregnant. I had to… deliver the baby.”

Jude didn’t speak. Just kept stroking his leg, listening.

“She was only a child herself, really,” he began haltingly. He didn’t even want to think about it, but now he’d started he couldn’t seem to keep the words in. “Been a slave for as long as she could remember. She was eight months pregnant. To one of _them_ , of course. She went into labour last night. I guessed just from looking at her that the baby would be stillborn…” His voice went hoarse. He cleared his throat.

“The birth was a disaster. She started haemorrhaging. There was something… really wrong, I think maybe an old break in her pelvis that had never healed right.” His hand shook as he raised his cigarette for one last drag. He leaned over to grind it out in the ashtray, and his eyes started to sting. He could feel Jude watching him, but he kept his gaze directed straight ahead.

“If I’d seen it sooner I could have tried a C-section,” he went on. Just the thought of the word _Caesarian_ left a bitter taste in his mouth. “It was far too late for the baby. But she could have lived. Instead I made her give birth, and it killed her.” He stretched out his fingers and stared at the backs of his hands. They were supposed to be his greatest tools. His vision blurred between blinks.

Jude shifted closer. His hand moved to Arcade’s back and rubbed gentle circles there between his shoulder blades. “Arcade—”

“The baby had started to decompose,” Arcade said. He heard Jude’s shaky exhale. He closed his eyes and saw little bluish limbs, something that was barely a face. He opened them again. “But she wanted to hold him.” The inside of his glasses was fogged. He took them off and they clattered onto the table. “I tried to fix her up, but I couldn’t. I don’t know if she knew it or not. But all she wanted was to hold her baby. So I let her.” He wasn’t entirely aware of when the tears had started to fall, but they were flowing freely, dripping down his face and off his chin. He didn’t reach to brush them away; didn’t try to acknowledge them at all. He felt set apart from himself, observing this show of emotion but not quite experiencing it. He felt strangely frozen.

He turned to look at Jude at last, and saw not just sorrow but anger in his eyes, too. The sight nudged at his heart. Jude wrapped both arms around him and held him close and tight. Arcade pressed his face into his lover’s shoulder. The smell of him was warm and real. Alive. Jude didn’t say anything trite, about the girl being at peace now, or free at last. Arcade couldn’t have abided hearing it. He’d heard it all already in tight voices from the barely-qualified NCR medic at the scene and the soldier who had stood by the entrance to the tent, their skin grey with nausea, averting their eyes from the girl laid out in her own cooling blood on the stretcher. They’d patted his back with stiff hands, relieved that he’d dealt with it so they didn’t have to.

Jude just held him, soothed him, stroked broad hands up and down his back, holding him together. “You did good,” he said after a while. “Letting her hold him.”

Arcade’s breath came out in a sob that broke the dam. The delayed pain flooded in to connect with the tears, and he feared it would crush him. He buried his face deeper into the hollow of Jude’s neck and just cried, eyes and nose streaming, soaking Jude’s collar as his back heaved and he gulped for air.

“This poor, twisted little thing,” he said, once he could breathe well enough to choke the words out. “Half-rotten inside her. And it was the only family she ever had.” His chest caved under the weight of that overwhelming _wrongness._ The last time he’d felt anything like it was when his mother passed. “It was a boy. He would have been a legionary. If he’d lived.”

“No he wouldn’t,” Jude replied. His voice was gruff against Arcade’s hair. “That baby would’ve died whether the Legion won or lost. And so would his momma. And their bodies would’ve been tossed into Lake Mead.” Arcade screwed his eyes up even tighter. Screwed up his hands in the fabric of Jude’s shirt. “At least this way she died with a little dignity, cared for by a doctor who thought her life was worth a damn.”

"Dignity,” Arcade gasped. “There wasn’t a single thing about it that was dignified.”

“You did something she asked. That was probably the first time in her life anyone had done that for her. You at least gave her that.”

“Like that makes it all right.” Arcade pulled away. He wiped a hand over his eyes and nose. “She deserved more than that. I should have saved her.”

“So should I. So should the NCR. So should anyone in that camp who still had even a flicker of a soul.” Jude took Arcade’s face between both his hands. “She shouldn’t have died, ain’t nothing about it that’s all right. But don’t think you did nothing for her, baby, ’cause you did.” His thumbs brushed under Arcade’s eyes.

Arcade held onto Jude’s forearms, let them anchor him as his breath gradually steadied.

“I’m so tired,” he said, although it wasn’t quite what he meant to say. What he felt was deeply, deeply disappointed. In himself, in the NCR, in a universe that allowed blameless people to suffer so bitterly. “I just want to believe that things will finally be better.”

“They are better. And they’ll be better still.” Jude leaned his forehead against Arcade’s. “But there’s no fixing it. There’s always gonna be bad thrown in with the good. That’s why this world needs people like you who keep on giving a shit.”

“I don’t know if I can do it any more.”

“So stop for a while,” Jude said. He kissed Arcade softly. “Stay home. Read. Smoke tobacco. You’ve earned it.”

Arcade felt suddenly ashamed. If anyone had earned a rest it was Jude, but he always kept on going. All the people Arcade admired kept on going. Tom and Zoe. Julie. Cass, who walked with a limp now but would tear a strip off anyone who suggested she slow down. Veronica, who had finished training with Usanagi and was throwing herself into her work for the Followers. Boone and Raul, men who not so long ago had thought themselves defeated, but were carving out new lives for themselves. He thought of the unnamed girl who had died on a stretcher under him. She had kept on going until fate and her body failed her.

“No, I’m still earning it,” he said, and kissed Jude back more urgently.

The salt of his tears was still on both their lips. He felt selfish for it, but Arcade needed the sweet touch of this man’s love to reach through his melancholy. He pressed harder into Jude’s mouth and his fingers tugged at the buttons on Jude’s shirt in a wordless plea. Jude gave him what he asked for, as he always did, murmuring his pride and adoration against Arcade’s skin as he peeled away his clothes and pushed him down, and for a little while made him forget about the harsh and unforgiving world outside their front door.

Later they lay together, their bare legs in a tangle so they could both fit on the couch. Jude pulled a blanket over them, a big heavy thing that Lily had crocheted from dyed Bighorner wool. Arcade knew they should move to the bed, but the weight of the blanket and his eyelids and Jude’s arm slung over his waist were dragging him towards a welcome sleep.

“Let’s go away somewhere,” Jude said. “As soon as things calm down here a little. Just you and me.”

Arcade mumbled a little and opened his eyes. “Away where?”

Jude kissed the shell of his ear. “I know the perfect place.”


End file.
